What is career planning?

Career planning incorporates short-term and long-term career goals,  personal goals and constraints. You don't always have control over outside factors such as health and family issues, but as far as possible, your planning process should incorporate the following stages:

Short-term planning	Assess your skills, knowledge, values, constraints and interests	Long-term planning
Step 1	Identify which new skills and knowledge you want to develop	Step 1
Step 2	Research career opportunities	Step 2
Step 3	Formulate a careers action plan with contingencies	Step 3
Up to 5 years ahead	Check the careers action plan for realism	From 5 to 10 years ahead

These two cycles of short-term and long-term planning run in parallel and should be reviewed regularly.

There are five steps to active career planning.

1. Self Assessment
2. Exploration and Research
3. Decision Making
4. Taking Action
5. Evaluation

Self Assessment

Self assessment revolves around the thoughtful consideration, reflection, and evaluation of your interests, personality characteristics, values, and skills through a variety of methods, such as the use of a whole host of career-related tools and instruments.

Exploration and Research

The career planning component consisting of exploration and research is all about being in information gathering mode. This is the time to explore, collect, and organize all available (and pursue not-so-available) resources to eventually begin analyzing them to see what top options arise.

Decision Making

The decision-making step of the career planning process is when you put all the pieces of information about yourself and your carefully collected career information together as best as possible to produce a list of career-related goals and options.

Taking 

Taking action is one of those things that’s easier said than done. This stage is about literally being proactive with your career plans and following through with what you’ve decided on doing.

Evaluation Action

After you have made your career-related decision(s) and identified your goals, keep in mind that many of the folks who achieve career success are the ones who continually evaluate and assess their status. They keep track of their career progress throughout their lifetime.